School Days
The public’s attitude to teachers is not entirely positive. We are dowdy, tweedy and humourless. Both the male and female of the species are moustachioed. Especially in Movember. Because teachers like that sort of thing – doing good in an easy and visual way, with the added joy of being ‘funny’.
Our own industry’s attitude to us is also sometimes a little cautious. One school I know of will not allow teachers to do their own laminating in case they damage themselves. We can clearly be trusted with your children, but not with any heavy or even lightweight machinery.
The list of what we cannot do as teachers is very long. We cannot give children aspirin; we cannot make them cups of tea; we cannot make physical contact with them unless it is to protect ourselves or another child. We must certainly not seek to influence their opinions, political, religious or moral. We can talk about ‘making a bad choice’ but cannot say something is ‘wrong’. Apart from the aspirin, I have broken all the above rules more than once.
It goes without saying that ‘safeguarding’ (the word we use for protecting) is even more important than our official job of teaching. Sometimes, safeguarding goes too far. Many schools ban conkers for health and safety reasons; some have even banned snow, or at any rate touching it. Talk about the snowflake generation.
All of this makes the attitude of our cousins across the herring pond all the more interesting. I should, I suppose, be delighted that, were I to teach in America, I would be trusted with not only a laminator but, potentially, a gun. To the majority of us in the Old World the idea of arming teachers is so laughable that it does not need discussion – or so at least I thought.
Musing on Twitter on the idea of arming teachers, I found myself for the first time in the kind of aggressive Twitter spat that I had never thought would affect me.
It turns out that, in this country, too, there are maniacs who seriously think that giving a teacher a rifle or semiautomatic would be a good idea. And I ask them this: have they any idea what life is like on the chalkface of teaching? Have they spent six hours a day with a variety of hormonal, anxious, aggressive, lazy and rude teenagers?
The only times that I have come near to crying in my career have not been with fear of aggression – the few times I’ve faced that, I’ve handled it well – but with frustration. And a frustrated person lashes out more quickly than a frightened one.
I am not a violent person, but I think of those teachers who lose their tempers and hurl books at children’s heads. I think of my science teacher, Mr Stevens, who undid the gas pipe to the Bunsen burner and put it in my mouth and opened the gas because I talked too much – imagine if he’d had a gun.
I think of the teachers who have collapsed under the strain of children, paperwork and bullying head teachers, and I wonder where they would be with a gun in their hands.
An inveterate thriller reader, I have always fancied the idea of a pearlhandled pistol tucked away in my handbag but, now someone has suggested it as a possibility, I realise it is the last thing I should be given.